Shelach Lecha 5784
Sermon given by Lawrence Cohen 29th June 2024
This week’s Sedra is Shlach Lechah.
It begins by telling us the story of the spies sent by Moses to survey the land of Canaan. 10 of the 12 spies return with an ambivalent and fearful report. The land is good, they say, but the people are giants and their cities impregnable. Two men, Joshua and Caleb, argue to the contrary. But their confidence is ignored and the people, fearful and demoralised, say: “Let us appoint a leader and go back to Egypt”.
God is angry and threatens to destroy the people and create a new people -beginning with Moses. Moses intercedes and succeeds in averting this fate – but God still insists that the people will be punished anyway by having to spend 40 years in the wilderness. Their children, not they, will enter the land.
There then follows a series of laws about sacrifices, challah, and forgiveness for sins committed inadvertently.
This section is interrupted by a brief narrative about a man being put to death, by stoning, for gathering wood on Shabbat.
The Parsha ends with the law about tzitzis – a text recited daily in the third paragraph of the Shema.
There are acts of threatened and actual savagery by God interspersed with two seemingly unconnected and mundane passages about sacrifices, challah and tzitzis. Verse 36 ends with the stoning of the Shabbat breaker and the very next verse talks about wearing tzitzis. The juxtaposition is jarring.
Three of those passages are well known.
The spies.
The old man who broke Shabbat.
The commandment about tzitzis.
Although these are interesting subjects, I found myself drawn to focus on God’s acts of savagery. The threatened annihilation of the entire people of Israel, and the stoning to death of the Shabbat breaker.
Now many of you will have heard of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Nearly 30 years ago, he wrote a book called The God Delusion. It can fairly be described as an evisceration of the principal arguments in favour of religion. It was thrillingly direct and daring for its time. It sold millions of copies all round the world.
When I read Shlach Lechah a few weeks ago, I was drawn back to one of the most dramatic and memorable paragraphs in The God Delusion.
Dawkins describes God as arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Amongst other things – petty, unjust, unforgiving, a control freak and a capricious, malevolent bully.
But is there any evidence for this litany of insults? Is it a fair description? Is God really so bad?
Well now. There are many places we can go to in the Bible to find all sorts of ways that one might consider that God has behaved badly. And equally, many places where it is said he behaved well.
But seeing as I am here to base my talk on Shlach Lechah, Let’s confine ourselves to just what it says in this week’s sedra about God’s behaviour.
First, there is the story of the 12 spies going into the land of Canaan. This was a commandment from God. Moses told the spies to see what was in the land and whether the people there were strong or weak. The spies were there for 40 days. On their return, 10 of the 12 spies told Moses that although Canaan was a land flowing with milk and honey, it was populated by fierce huge people who could not be conquered. “We were like grasshoppers”, they said.
The people of Israel were so downhearted and devastated by this turn of events that unbelievably, they actually suggested going back to Egypt. They had just emerged from generations of slavery and oppression and yet they wanted to return to Egypt rather than risk trying to conquer the land of Canaan
I’m going to make a quick diversion here. During my research, I came across the writings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson. He has an interesting interpretation of the wish of the spies to remain in the desert. In the Song of the Sea which the children of Israel sang on the Exodus from Egypt it says:
“All the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.
Terror and Dread fall upon them.
Because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as stone”.
So the children of Israel previously had confidence that with God’s help they would conquer the land of Canaan – so what changed?
In Rabbi Shneerson’s opinion, the spies were not afraid of failure. They were afraid of success. In the desert, they were close to God. There was manna. They were protected by the Clouds of Glory that surrounded the encampment They were better off in the wilderness – unfettered by the bothers of the material world.
Once they entered Eretz Yisrael they would be just one more nation in a world of nations, with the same kind of economic, social and political problems that every other nation has to deal with. They might lose their close connection with God which was so strong in the wilderness. I was struck by the relevance this interpretation has for us today where Israel is indeed just one nation amongst all the nations of the world, with all the problems that they also face.
Back to the sedra and the story of the spies. What was God‘s response to the reaction of the people of Israel to the report of the spies? He was livid. He was furious at what he perceived as his betrayal by the people of Israel. He called the spies “This evil congregation”. He said he would destroy the entire nation – literally the entire nation – leaving just Moses alive.
But he was persuaded by Moses to relent. Instead, God decreed that not a single adult who had come out of Egypt would ever set foot in the land of Israel. He said of them that their “Carcasses would fall in the desert”. What an apocalyptic image that is! Not only that, but the next generation – those who would go into the land of Israel – would be condemned to wander in the wilderness for the next 40 years – a year for each day the spies were in Canaan.
I read this story 3 times. The first time I read it I thought I must have completely misunderstood. I could hardly believe how harsh God was towards his chosen people.
Then later in the sedra there is the story of a man gathering sticks on Shabbat. The people saw him and brought him to Moses. Moses sought advice from God. God told him to put the man to death by stoning. And this was done by the Council of Elders on behalf of the people of Israel. A man whose only sin was to gather sticks on Shabbat was put to death by stoning.
Let’s go back to Dawkins and his litany of insults. This is a very personal view – but I say that God comes out of this week’s sedra as jealous, petty, unjust, unforgiving, vindictive, bloodthirsty, capricious and malevolent.
But I thought to myself … there must be commentaries explaining why God behaved in this way. I wanted to find out why God is capable of such behaviour. What is it, I wondered, that makes God so unforgiving? If there was a reasonable explanation, I would at least have understood.
But what I found, amongst respected rabbinic commentators, was a marked and consistent reluctance to criticise God in any way. Rather, the commentaries focused only on the behaviour of the people and described how their behaviour in turn provoked God‘s reaction. In other words, if the people had not behaved in the way that they did, then God would not have reacted so violently.
Other commentaries I read say God does not punish in order to exact revenge. He punishes in order to enable a person to reach the next level of his spiritual development. But by failing to meet the challenge he is presented with, a person demonstrates that he is unwilling to reach this next level on his own – and therefore he needs to be punished.
To me, that felt just like victim blaming.
It put me in mind of the victim of domestic abuse whose assailant – whilst raining blows down on his victims head – says to her
“This is your fault. I’m only doing this because of what you did to me”.
Can something positive be taken from the events of Shlach Lechah? Despite my distaste about God’s behaviour – I think something positive can be taken away.
My reaction to the events described in Shlach Lechah led me to think about the nature of compassion. The ancient Talmudic concept of “Rachmonos”. The Talmudic rabbis considered compassion to be one of the three pillars of Judaism, the other two being the study of the torah and the act of worship. We refer to God as “Av Harachamim”. Father of mercy. Rachamim comes from the Hebrew word rechem, meaning “womb”. It is the boundaryless love of a mother for her child. God is to us as a mother is to her child.
In my opinion, in each of the stories in this week’s sedra, God could have shown greater compassion.
First, the spies. The fact that God was persuaded not to annihilate the nation of Israel is interpreted by some commentators as a sign of his compassion. But I don’t see it that way. It wasn’t active compassion – that you and I would recognise. God merely imposed a lesser, yet still devastating, punishment.
After Moses told the people their punishment, they realised they had sinned – and they repented. They went up to the mountain top to invade Canaan. Moses told them it was too late because God was not amongst them and they would not succeed. But they went ahead anyway – and suffered a terrible defeat by the Canaanites and the Amalekites.
Could God have relented a second time after the people repented? Could he have come amongst them to support them in their endeavours? Of course he could. He could have chosen to reassure the people of Israel that with him by their side they could conquer the land of Canaan – even though they were terrified of the people there. He could have been supportive, encouraging and kind. He could have been compassionate. Instead he was vindictive.
And what of the fate of the man gathering wood on Shabbat? It need hardly be said that God’s treatment of the poor man whose only sin was to gather sticks on Shabbat need not have been so violent. Did it really warrant his death? Could God have shown more compassion? The answer is obvious.
The Torah has much to say about compassion. We are told again and again that God is compassionate. Some commentators say that the ultimate act of God’s compassion was to rescue the people of Israel from hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt.
But does the Torah teach us how to be compassionate?
There are tractates of the Talmud dealing with almost every conceivable facet of Jewish life. There is the tractate of Shabbat. The tractate of Rosh Hashanah. The tractate of washing your hands. There are literally dozens of tractates. But there is no tractate teaching us how to be compassionate.
There doesn’t seem to be a toolbox in the Bible for this.
So how do we learn compassion?
We must learn from our parents and teachers. They teach us the difference between right and wrong. The difference between kindness and unkindness. Without that guidance, we would be adrift. We would be rudderless in the sea of modern life.
Every day, in so many ways, we are faced with situations where we reach a fork in the road and we have to decide which path to take. When that happens, it is our task as human beings – with free will as God intended – to pause and reflect before taking the next step. It isn’t easy and I’m not advocating a counsel of perfection. We are all imperfect. We often behave badly.
Perhaps a 13th century mystic poet named Jalaluddin Rumi can help us.
He was the author of many aphorisms, one of which might help us in our quest for the art and learning of compassion.
He says this:
“Before you speak, let your words pass through three Gates.
At the first gate, ask yourself – is it true?
At the second gate, ask yourself – is it necessary?
At the third gate, ask yourself – is it kind?”
Rumi exhorts us to pause and reflect.
Truth.
Necessity.
Kindness.
I wonder, did God allow his decisions to pass through these three gates before he imposed his punishments upon the children of Israel and the man who collected sticks on Shabbat? Was it necessary to stone the man to death? Was it kind? It could be said that the man was knowingly and defiantly disobeying a commandment to keep Shabbat. So maybe it was a way of God showing that he is powerful and his commandments should be obeyed. But is an act of disobedience a severe offence to warrant execution? Was it a kind and compassionate thing for God to do?
When the people of Israel could not enter the promised land but would instead wander in the desert for 40 years, God may well have felt that his punishment was necessary in order for them to understand what they had done. But was it really? Even after the children of Israel had repented? Where was redemption? Where was compassion?
So, finally, I came to the conclusion that we must look to ourselves to be compassionate. We know we can do this. The notion that human beings can exercise their own free will when making moral decisions is axiomatic to Judaism. God has given us that free will. We must use it wisely.
We must use it with compassion.